What's the Difference Between Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS?
Compare Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon ECS
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Amazon EKS
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Category
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Containers, Orchestration |
Containers, Kubernetes |
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Description
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Fully managed AWS native container orchestration service |
Managed Kubernetes service for running containerized applications |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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No additional charge for EC2 launch type; Fargate pricing for Fargate launch type |
$0.10/hr per cluster + underlying compute |
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Free tier
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No |
No |
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Expert take
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“ECS is the fastest path to running containers on AWS. Deep integration with IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC means less glue code, and flexible compute options (EC2, Fargate, or ECS Managed Instances) let you match infrastructure to your workload without managing orchestration overhead.” |
“EKS is production-grade Kubernetes without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of operating it. From Auto Mode handling compute lifecycle to EKS Capabilities providing managed Argo CD and resource orchestration, teams get the full Kubernetes ecosystem with the reliability and scale of AWS underneath” |
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Product page
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When to use Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS
Use Amazon ECS when:
- Microservices
- Batch jobs
- Application migration
- Hybrid deployments
Use Amazon EKS when:
- Kubernetes workloads
- Hybrid deployments
- Machine learning
- Batch processing
Next steps with AWS for Containers
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